Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  “The sweater was doing nothing for Audrey,” said Warner, “and Audrey was doing near as nothing for the sweater.” Invoking the eleventh commandment of fashion (“What God’s forgotten, we stuff with cotton”), they coaxed her into shooting in falsies. Others might speak of her “splendid emaciation,” but she didn’t find it so splendid. “I’d like to be not so flat-chested,” she said. “I was too thin and I had no bosom to speak of. Add [it] up, and a girl can feel terribly self-conscious.”28

  There was no reason to feel that way in the opinion of Marcel le Bon, a handsome young French crooner who had several featured spots in Sauce Piquante and dreamed of becoming the next Maurice Chevalier. Early in the production, he and Audrey began dating and fell madly, if briefly, in love. By the final weeks of the show’s run, le Bon was leaving roses in her dressing room nightly and had become the first serious boyfriend of her life. Backstage gossip was much livened by rumors of a marriage.

  When Landeau heard of it, he was furious, claiming to have inserted a “no-marriage” clause in Audrey’s contract. Reports that he was threatening to sue her if she married le Bon appeared in the tabloids. She also had to endure the wrath of her mother, who believed Marcel was plotting to cash in on Audrey’s greater talent.

  In fact, le Bon was more her pal than her paramour, but it didn’t seem so at the time. Landeau’s testy mood was related to the fact that his show was sinking, despite good notices, and would soon close—in June 1950—after just sixty-seven performances. He lost 20,000 pounds and found himself in bankruptcy court. For the moment, he was staving off that disaster by cannibalizing some sketches from Sauce Piquante into a shorter revue called Summer Nights for Ciro’s, one of the most chic nightclubs in London. Moonlighting there was financially welcome but exhausting, Audrey later told Dominick Dunne:

  “I did two shows at the same time, a musical revue at the Cambridge Theatre, twelve performances a week, and then we were all shipped to Ciro’s nightclub right after the show, and there we did a floor show.”29 She would finish up at Ciro’s around two a.m., walk home with some of the other girls through Piccadilly (“so lovely and safe then”), and sleep until noon. In the afternoons, she and Marcel and others from Sauce Piquante worked on a new cabaret act they were trying to concoct. As if that weren’t enough, she was also doing “a bit of TV” at the time though, unfortunately, none of her television work from that pre-videotape era has survived.30

  The trade publications were now starting to take notice. In early 1950, Picturegoer called her “a heart-shattering young woman with a style of her own, no mean acting ability, and a photogenic capacity for making the newspaper pages.”31

  Nudged as always by her mother, Audrey took steps to improve the raw skills that such press notices insisted she possessed. Earlier, when informed that people had trouble hearing her one and only line in High Button Shoes, she had taken a few singing lessons—not to learn how to sing, but how to speak. Shades of Eliza Doolittle. Soon after, in between the two Sauces, she enrolled in the Saturday morning movement classes of Betty and Philip Buchell, prominent London teacher-choreographers.

  With Landeau’s financial help, she now graduated to elocution lessons with Felix Aylmer (1889-1979), a delightful old character actor who subsidized his modest income as a supporting actor in films and plays by taking a few pupils on the side—Vivien Leigh and Charles Laughton among them, and now Audrey.

  She had seen precious few “serious” pictures in her life, but Laurence Olivier’s two great Shakespearean films, Henry V (1944, Aylmer as the Archbishop of Canterbury) and Hamlet (1948, Aylmer as Polonius) were among them. Having admired him in both, Audrey now drank in Aylmer’s instruction in diction and his techniques for “responsive stillness” to lure an audience into watching her even when she was doing nothing in a scene.

  “He taught me to concentrate intelligently on what I was doing,” she said, “and made me aware that all actors need a ‘method’ of sorts to be even vaguely professional.”32

  She was all the while performing two and sometimes three shows daily, one of which was attended by the actor and future director Richard Attenborough: “Everybody knew there was something totally remarkable about her [and] that sooner or later, she was going to become a major, major movie star.”33

  The wisdom of hindsight may have been at work there, but Attenborough was not alone. Countless others claimed to have “discovered” Audrey during her brief cabaret stint. Stanley Holloway, who later played Alfred Doolittle to Audrey’s Eliza in My Fair Lady, mocked the many people “who have genuinely kidded themselves into believing that they were the first to recognise Audrey Hepburn’s potential radiant talent.”34 Britain’s Picturegoer magazine had the inside track in 1950:

  “The fact that some people went night after night to see her in cabaret at Ciro’s was a good enough reason for Associated British to talk of signing her for the screen.”35

  ROBERT LENNARD caught and liked her act at Ciro’s, if not night after night, at least once. Having entered the British film industry in 1930, Lennard was now casting director of Associated British Pictures Corporation (ABC). He had a sixth sense and a distinguished reputation for finding and signing up future stars. But the reputation of his studio was not so lustrous.

  “ABC pictures were generally second features,” says Britain’s greatest film historian, Kevin Brownlow. “I can’t think of a major ABC film. In England, you went to the movies to see American pictures in those days. When you saw the credits and heard companies like Columbia or RKO, you got a buzz out of just the name. When you heard ABC, your heart sank.”36

  Located in London, ABC was protected from its overwhelming Hollywood competition by a government requirement that exhibitors show at least one British film for every two American ones. The result was a plethora of generally dismal “quota quickies”—125 of them a year—most ending up as the lesser half of double features headed by Hollywood films.

  Artistic virtues aside, those pictures were the bread-and-butter of Britain’s postwar film industry, of which Lennard was both an employee and a champion. Smitten by Audrey in the Ciro’s show, he arranged a meeting between her and Italian director Mario Zampi, who was in London preparing a new comedy for ABC called Laughter in Paradise. At the start of the war, Zampi had been arrested under Regulation 18b (like Joseph Hepburn-Ruston) for his alleged pro-fascist beliefs, but was soon released. He claimed to have seen Audrey in Sauce Piquante fourteen times and now offered her a major role in Laughter in Paradise. But she turned it down “for personal reasons,” apologizing that “I’ve just signed to do a short tour in a show. I can’t break the contract.”

  The real reason was Marcel le Bon. He and Audrey and their Sauce pals had worked out a new cabaret act and were all set to take it on the road when, suddenly, the bookings fell through. Le Bon blamed himself and, in impulsive Gallic fashion, now abandoned Audrey and England both and boarded a ship for America.

  Though upset by his departure, she was not really devastated and—now that her “personal reasons” had evaporated—rushed back to tell Zampi, “If the part’s still available, and you’re not too mad with me, I’d be thrilled to do it.” He wasn’t mad, but he had already given her role to Beatrice Campbell. “The only role not yet cast is a bit-part of a girl who sells cigarettes,” he said. “Do you want to do it?”

  Yes, she did.

  Laughter in Paradise was a major cut above ABC’s average “quota quickie.”

  Its witty story, by Michael Pertwee and Jack Davies, has a dying eccentric (Hugh Griffith) leaving his heirs a fortune—on condition that they carry out the most embarrassing tasks: His sister (Fay Compton), who terrorizes her domestic help, must work as a servant for a month. His pompous nephew (Alastair Sim) must spend a month in jail and postpone his wedding to a female soldier. (“What am I to say to Commandant Bulthwaite and the girls?” she exclaims. “They’ve bought us a toast rack!”) His nephew (Guy Middleton), a shameless womanizer, must marry the first unat
tached woman he speaks to.

  Audrey’s big scene—as a cigarette girl in short black dress and white apron—comes thirty minutes into the film. She wanders up to Middleton in a bar, flashes a dazzling smile and says, “Hello! Who wants a ciggy?” She has two more brief appearances in the film, which is a morality tale: The greedy heirs all perform their assignments, but it turns out Griffith was really flat broke, and none of them will get a penny.

  Laughter in Paradise was one of the top-grossing British films of its year and—on the strength of “Who wants a ciggy?”—Audrey’s film career was launched. ABC offered her a seven-year contract but, for the time being, she preferred to keep her options open. Girls who signed long-term British contracts in those days rarely made it to stardom. A few, such as Natasha Parry and Honor Blackman, survived, but most—Carol Marsh, Susan Shaw, Joan Dowling, Patricia Plunkett, Jane Hylton, Patricia Dainton, Hazel Court—were never heard from again.37

  So as a freelance rather than contract actress, Audrey went straight from Laughter in Paradise into production of One Wild Oat, an ABC comedy directed by Charles Saunders, based on a bedroom farce of the 1948 West End season. She had three days’ work playing a hotel receptionist, but most of her bits ended up on the cutting-room floor: It seems that Audrey was the “wild oat” and that the British censors objected to both the visual and verbal insinuations of her character.

  Forty-five years later, director Saunders recalls One Wild Oat as “one of the nicest films I worked on, shot entirely in the studio in about three weeks.” He, too, had seen Audrey in Sauce Piquante and cast her on the basis of that alone. “Her only line was, ‘Good afternoon, this is the Regency Hotel.’ That’s all.”

  Was he surprised by the speed of her subsequent fame?

  “Surprised and bloody annoyed, quite frankly,” says Saunders. “We tried hard but we just didn’t have the means at that time to get her under contract.”38

  In the gentle hands of Saunders and Zampi, Audrey’s film work thus far had been pleasant. She would be exposed to a very different kind of director in her next film, Young Wives’ Tale, a static romantic comedy about England’s postwar housing shortage. Its stars were Joan Greenwood, Helen Cherry and Nigel Patrick. Its director was the tyrannical Henry Cass, and Audrey, in the minor role of a typist, somehow ran afoul of him.

  “I was his whipping boy, that was for sure,” she said. “Half the time I was in tears, but adorable Joan Greenwood and Nigel Patrick—the stars—were very sweet and protective.39 [It was] the only unhappy picture I ever made because Cass had it in for me, and I was miserable. I didn’t like Henry Cass.”40

  She had her revenge of sorts when Young Wives’ Tale opened in New York in November of 1951. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther berated it for being as “dismal [a comedy] as ever leaked from an uninspired brain” but, even so, made it a point to mention “that pretty Audrey Hepburn.”41

  By now she had signed a contract and, after Young Wives’ Tale, ABC loaned her out to Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios, which specialized in sophisticated, irreverent comedies. Kind Hearts and Coronets was its most recent success. The Ealing film at hand was Lavender Hill Mob, directed by Charles Crichton and starring Alec Guinness as a timid bank clerk who conceives and executes a most daring robbery. It would be one of Eating‘s—and England’s—finest comedies, and Guinness, who had met Audrey through Felix Aylmer, ihelped her obtain a small part in it. She is “Chiquita” in an airport lounge, where Guinness calls her over and hands her a wad of bills. “Oh, but how sweet of you!” she coos, and deposits a thank-you kiss on his forehead.

  Lavender Hill Mob was named the best film of 1951 by the British Film Academy, but Audrey’s contribution was unnoticed. “I paid no particular attention to her,” said Balcon.

  But Alec Guinness did.

  “She only had half a line to say, and I don’t think she said it in any particular or interesting way,” Guinness recalls. “But her faunlike beauty and presence were remarkable.”42

  Audrey had just tested for the lead in ABC’s Lady Godiva Rides Again. Guinness now recommended her to director Mervyn LeRoy, who was then in London to cast the MGM epic Quo Vadis?. She duly made that test, too, in full Roman costume. But there were no callbacks. Audrey was judged too thin for the first part, which went to Pauline Stroud, and too inexperienced for the second, which went to Deborah Kerr.

  “Quo vadis?” indeed. Where to go from here?

  HEPBURN WAS ambitious and focused on her career, but she was also, privately, a very traditional and romantic woman determined to avoid the disastrous experience of her parents. After Marcel le Bon’s departure, she continued to seek a serious relationship and, in summer 1950, she found it in the person of James Hanson.

  They met shortly after she finished Lavender Hill Mob and immediately hit it off. She was twenty-two. He was twenty-eight, six-foot-four and the multimillionaire scion of a Yorkshire trucking industry family. He served dynamically in World War II from 1939 (at age seventeen) to its end, with the Duke of Wellington’s regiment, among others, in North Africa, Italy and Greece. Nowadays he was a horseman, yachtsman and master of foxhounds, and a trustee of the D’Oyly Carte opera company.

  Hanson was an elegant socialite and a dashing lover of the good life. He dressed impeccably, commanded a fleet of expensive cars, owned his own plane, and frequented the best nightspots of London and New York. He adored beautiful women—beautiful actresses in particular—and they invariably returned the favor. In recent months, he had been Jean Simmons’s escort in London, but she was quickly forgotten when Audrey entered his life.

  “When I met her, she had just finished with [Marcel le Bon],” he recalls today. “I got lucky and found her when she was on her own.” Hanson—now Lord Hanson—is one of the wealthiest men in England. Still trim and engaging, he sits back in the London headquarters of Hanson PLC, his $17-billion global conglomerate, locks his hands behind his head, and smiles at the recollection of Audrey:We met at a cocktail party in Mayfair at Les Ambassadeurs, a very popular place, and we were attracted to each other right away. I invited her for lunch next day, we soon fell in love, became engaged a few months later. She was a one-man woman, and it was a relationship of that kind. We became extremely good friends. Everybody saw in her this wonderful life and brightness and terrific strength of character. She was a very strong young woman who clearly had the determination she was going to need in order to achieve what she did. She had done a couple of small parts in movies, and her career was just about to blossom. There was no doubt about that by anybody who saw her.43

  The Hanson family’s transport business, in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, had thrived for a hundred years. But in 1948, the Labour government nationalized all railways, airlines, trucking and shipping companies, and Hanson found himself out of a job. At that point, he bought a trucking firm in Canada, shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic thereafter.k

  During that time, he did not neglect romance, as one of the all-time authorities on that subject—Zsa Zsa Gabor—confirms:

  “Audrey and I started together in London. She was a beautiful Dutch girl, engaged to James Hanson. I was making my first movie, Moulin Rouge. His partner Gordon White was chasing me, and Jimmy was chasing her. They were dahling-such a handsome couple. Jimmy was not only rich, but charming.” 44

  Audrey thought so, too. “Jimmy,” for his part, observed his girl closely and remembers her as “not particularly strong” but largely recovered from her postwar debility. He debunks the claims that she suffered from any kind of anorexia at the time.

  “She had dancer’s legs and a dancer’s upper body, which is often wasted because of the perspiration from all that practicing,” says Hanson. “I would have thought that she might have difficulty with her health in the future. But she was an extremely healthy young girl then, apart from the fact that like many dancers, she looked as if she should be built up a bit. Yet she ate well and enjoyed her food. She could eat like a horse! Any problem that developed
certainly wasn’t evident then.”

  One evident problem, however, was her mother. Though impressed with Hanson’s social and financial status, Ella was reportedly horrified at the thought of Audrey’s marriage and exile to the Yorkshire boondocks, just when her career was at the takeoff point. Such, at least, was the story repeated in most later books and articles about Audrey—but quite untrue.

  “I liked Ella very much,” Hanson insists. “It was certainly not true that my relationship with her was poor. She was always very encouraging about me with Audrey. She felt the age difference—about six years—was right and that somebody in a solid business was right for somebody on the artistic side. She would be marrying somebody with his feet on the ground, not in show business, with all its uncertainties. We talked about it many times. We’d already worked that out: Audrey was going to make one movie a year with the option to do a play whenever she wanted to—pretty much the pattern Audrey followed anyway. That was partially because she wanted to have a life also as my wife.

  “We were a very happy ‘family’ in the two years we were together. I spent a good deal of time with Ella. She thought we were well suited. She had no reservations about my being in business and Audrey being an actress. Ella was not fond of show business people. I did a lot for her, as I would a future mother-in-law. I tried to develop a relationship, and it worked.”45

  Audrey often described her mother as “a lady of very strict Victorian standards.” But Dutch Victorian was different from British Victorian, and on the subject of sex, at least, her liberal attitude astonished Hanson a year or so later in Rome.

  “I must have been twenty-nine or thirty at the time,” he recalls. “It was the first time in my life I had ever slept in the same bed as my fiancée—with her mother bringing the breakfast in. That was something I had never experienced. There was always a rather furtive dashing back to your room. But Ella was completely different. I remember her bringing the breakfast into that room. She was a very earthy woman.”